'THE BALLOT WE CANNOT SEE: WHY NBA MUST ABANDON ELECTRONIC VOTING'

By Jamaldeen Bamidele

On Saturday,18th July 2026, the Nigerian Bar Association went to the polls to elect its 33rd President. Voting was scheduled to open at midnight, but it did not. In the early hours of election day, the Electoral Committee of the Nigerian Bar Association announced that its voting platform had come under what it called a deliberate, coordinated and sustained cyberattack, and suspended the commencement of voting indefinitely. Voting eventually began at 7:35 a.m., nearly eight hours late, on the strength of an assurance that no votes had been accepted while the system was down and that the platform had been secured.

We were asked, as we are always asked, to take the Committee’s word for it. There is, indeed, a problem with how the Bar now elects its leaders. An association of over one hundred thousand lawyers, the loudest voice in this country on electoral integrity, conducted its most important internal contest on a system that could be attacked in the dark, restored in the dark, and vouched for only by the people who ran it. No member of the Bar saw the attack. No member of the Bar saw the repair. No member of the Bar can independently verify that the eight lost hours left no fingerprints on the result. The entire legitimacy of the exercise rests on trusting a machine we cannot inspect and a committee that has historically refused to open its books.

An Election Besieged From Every Side

The 2026 election cycle was overshadowed by a wave of litigation, regional politicking, allegations of bias against the national leadership, disputes over the composition and conduct of the ECNBA, and an extraordinary public disagreement between the NBA and the Attorney-General of the Federation. An Oyo State High Court granted an interim injunction barring the Association from processing presidential nominations outside a consensus-candidate arrangement declared by a sectional caucus; another judge of the same court initially halted all steps toward the election entirely. Two of the three presidential candidates petitioned the Board of Trustees demanding the President’s resignation over alleged partisan conduct, allegations he denied.

Then, days before the poll, the Managing Director of the election service provider was arrested, an event so alarming that the National Executive Council convened an emergency meeting, resolved that the election would proceed, and found itself demanding that its own electoral officials be protected from harassment, arrest or interference by security agencies. Pause on that. The umbrella body of Nigerian lawyers had to pass a resolution pleading that the people conducting its election should not be detained. Whatever the rights and wrongs of that arrest, it exposed a structural truth we have been unwilling to confront which is that an electronic election has a single point of failure, and that point of failure is a private company. Arrest one man, seize one server, compromise one database, and the entire franchise of over one hundred thousand lawyers hangs in the balance.

The moral authority of the Bar is our working capital, and we are spending it recklessly. We cannot demand of the nation a standard of electoral transparency that we will not impose on ourselves.”

Apart from the cyberattack and the delayed opening on the day of the election, one of the presidential candidates, Lateef Akangbe SAN, lodged a formal protest describing the process as a catastrophic structural and technical collapse. He alleged that one-time passwords were sent to voters by email rather than SMS, contrary to the Committee’s own revised guidelines and to assurances given to members less than twenty-four hours earlier, and that the electronic ballot properly displayed the photograph of only one of the three presidential candidates. He demanded suspension of the election, preservation of all electronic voting records, and an independent forensic examination. Those allegations remain allegations, and the leading candidate can hardly be blamed for defects in a platform she did not build. But that is precisely the point. In an electronic election, nobody can be cleared and nobody can be condemned, because the evidence lives inside a system that members cannot examine.

We Have Been Here Before

If any of this feels familiar, it should. Two years ago, the 2024 national elections ended in almost identical acrimony. Two candidates, Tobenna Erojikwe and Chinedum Ikwuazom SAN, publicly rejected the results and demanded an audit. Ikwuazom’s letter to the ECNBA chairman itemised the anomalies his team had observed such as reports of identity theft of voters and potential double voting, discrepancies in how votes were displayed and updated, suspicious patterns of vote increases, and discrepancies in vote patterns. He asked for the server and application log files, the complete database records, and the raw material from which the truth could be established one way or the other and the first runner-up was forced into litigation to compel their release.

That litigation was still crawling through the Court of Appeal in Abuja as recently as May of this year, nearly two full years after the votes were cast. Think about what that means. The winner of that election has nearly completed his tenure. His successor was elected this weekend. And the Bar has still not been permitted to look inside the box from 2024. I am not saying that the 2024 election was rigged since no such finding exists. However, an electoral body with nothing to hide does not spend two years resisting disclosure of its own records to its own members. When the same Association then carries the same opaque technology into the next election cycle without ever resolving the last one, it should not be surprised that the 2026 contest descended into injunctions, protest letters, arrests and midnight cyberattacks.

The Case For Returning To The Physical Ballot

Electronic voting was sold to the Bar as the cure for the thuggery and delegate-capture of the old conference-floor elections. It was meant to enfranchise every lawyer, at the click of a button. That promise deserves honest evaluation after six election cycles, and the evaluation is damning. It is my submission that what this E-voting system has done is to digitise manipulation beyond the reach of proof. A stuffed ballot box can be opened and counted. A stolen server log can only be imagined. Physical fraud leaves witnesses, fingerprints, torn papers and angry observers. Digital fraud, if it occurs, leaves nothing a member can see.

The system is not only vulnerable but also unfalsifiable, and an unfalsifiable election is no election at all. The electronic voting system has also not delivered the participation that was its principal justification. By late afternoon on Saturday, roughly twenty thousand of the more than eighty-two thousand registered voters had cast ballots. That is about one-quarter of the total eligible voters. We dismantled the physical ballot for a system that three in four eligible lawyers cannot use and do not trust. We need to go back to conducting physical elections by secret ballot where nobody needs to hack anything. Any member who doubts the count can stand in the room and watch it happen. The NBA should designate each of the Association’s more than one hundred and thirty branches as a polling centre, let members vote where their practising certificates place them, count openly at each branch before candidates’ agents and observers, and transmit signed, published result sheets for national collation. That is the same architecture every credible public election in the world still relies upon, for the simple reason that no one has yet invented a substitute for the human eye.

Of course, I know that there will be objections. Cost? The Bar already pays handsomely for election service providers, cybersecurity teams and the litigation that follows every disputed e-vote; branch-based physical voting spreads modest costs across existing structures. Convenience? A profession that requires members to appear physically in court can require them to appear physically, once every two years, to choose its leadership; and the dignity of that civic act is part of its value.

Disenfranchisement of lawyers abroad or in transit? A narrow, verifiable proxy or absentee window can be designed for genuinely exceptional cases, as electoral systems everywhere have done for over a century. None of these inconveniences comes close to outweighing the cost we are currently paying, which is the slow death of confidence in the Bar’s internal democracy.

Physician, Heal Thyself

There is a deeper wound here than any single election. The Nigerian Bar Association exists, in large part, to hold power accountable. It monitors national elections. It litigates electoral fraud. It lectures INEC on transparency and lectures governments on the rule of law. However, when its own members asked to audit its own election, it refused and fought the request in court. When its own process collapsed on election morning, its only answer was reassurance. The moral authority of the Bar is our working capital, and we are spending it recklessly. We cannot demand of the nation a standard of electoral transparency that we will not impose on ourselves.

So let this be the last one. The incoming administration and the National Executive Council should place before the Bar a constitutional amendment abolishing electronic voting for national offices and restoring branch-based physical balloting, counted in the open. Alongside it, the ECNBA must finally release the 2024 election materials and submit both the 2024 and 2026 platforms to a genuinely independent forensic audit. Elections derive their legitimacy from the ability of the loser, and the loser’s supporters, to see with their own eyes that they lost. Until every Nigerian lawyer can see that again, every NBA election will end the way the last two have ended, which is not good for the association.

Bamidele is a lawyer and public affairs analyst
The views expressed in this article are entirely those of the author.

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